Indigenous stories, and the weather in Calcutta: Two new Marie Curie postdoctoral fellows at The Greenhouse

In this year's awards, The Greenhouse at the University of Stavanger has received one postdoctoral fellowship and also had one moved up from last year's waiting list, both in the growing field of environmental humanities, a research area that combines the humanities and social sciences with environmental sciences to explore and address environmental challenges.

‒ The importance of an environmental humanities perspective on contemporary environmental problems

“We are thrilled that both of these projects have been funded. They show the importance of an environmental humanities perspective on contemporary environmental problems,” says Greenhouse Co-Director Dolly Jørgensen.

With these new awards, The Greenhouse has now successfully obtained five MSCA-fellowships since 2020.

"This consolidates The Greenhouse's position as a living and dynamic community for world-class research within the environmental humanities," says Greenhouse Center Co-Director Finn Arne Jørgensen.

Environmental humanities is about investigating how human behaviour, values, culture, history, literature and philosophy affect our relationship with the environment, and how we can use this knowledge to develop sustainable solutions to environmental problems.

Researching Calcutta's urban, material and cultural history through the lens of the weather

Animesh Chatterjee will join The Greenhouse as a postdoctoral fellow with his project "Weathering Colonial Calcutta". Here he will explore the urban, material and cultural history of Calcutta; a story of changing knowledge of and everyday experiences of weather. His project will start in April 2023. From November 2020, he has been an ERC postdoctoral researcher on the project “A Global History of Material Culture and Technology, 1850-2000” at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany.

Travel fiction by Indigenous American authors

Daniel Bowman's project "The Nation of Mechanics" examines fiction by Indigenous American authors of the late twentieth century for literary representations of animals, automobiles, and the natural environment. Bowman’s project develops a novel approach to reading the road journey in American fiction by centering Indigenous stories. Part of his project includes the creation of a public-facing exhibition in cooperation with the Kim-Wiat/Eisenburg Native American Literature Collection at Amherst College, Massachusetts, USA.

Environmental humanities includes a variety of different disciplines, like philosophy, anthropology, history, literary scholarship, culture and media studies, and linguistics. Together, these subjects contribute to insights into how we can understand and engage with environmental challenges in a more holistic and sustainable manner.

Text: Kristin Vestrheim Cranner.